... even though it's not orange anymore. Last month, I'd moved one big attic box into that room and spent a day searching for the notebook, then left the "orange room" looking like a stage set at the end of Act I. The character (me) has been rooting around for the notebook and flinging old manuscripts on the floor.
After yesterday, as the curtain opens on Act II, the set looks like this:
Time has passed. The character is still looking. But the truth is, when I sat down in that chair to do a new session of rooting and flinging, I took the first item off the top of the pile on the table, and — lo and behold — it was the notebook!
I was thrilled to find the notebook, which is 139 handwritten pages of the effort I made, when I was in my early 20s, to preserve my memories of childhood. I might tell you some more about that some time. The entries are numbered. There are 130 of them. Are they like blog posts? Yes and no. In blogging, I'm much more cagey about how much I let you see into my private life.
As the orange room continues in that Act II condition, I'm at my table in the room we call "the big room" on what is the 6,690th day of writing this blog. The blue notebook is at my elbow, expecting to be read. Now that I've found it, I know where it is and don't need to wolf it down suddenly. I want to observe myself reading it. Are these the memories I remember? Is this an unremembered thing juxtaposed to an intact memory?
Meade wasn't around when I dragged the boxes out of the attic and into the orange room, but this morning, he found a little scrap of newsprint that had flown free of one of the boxes and landed on the hallway floor. One can only guess how this snippet got to survive in our attic all these years, but I'm sure it never expected life would end so good:
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You're a tidy flinger, always keeping the props safely behind the proscenium. Do you ever flirt with the front row, winding up for a large throw into their laps, but instead tossing gently at your feet? Do you ever break the fourth wall, letting a notebook fall astray, and ask an audience member to hand it back?
Your room has a theme song:
https://youtu.be/Xl6SkGjNqa8
Is "the World War One veteran of the British Army's Jewish Legion" a second mention?
At least he "said," and didn't "interject," or "quip."
I am sitting in a room with four or five plastic bins, the paper trails of several lives, mostly from my father's dwindling line. Old clippings, photos, programs, menus, the odd letter or packet of letters, and some of it in German. (They confirm that whatever good looks we have is mostly from ma's side.)
Every few weeks or months I'll impose a bit of order on a small portion, and vow to get it all organized and scanned. Historians in future centuries (assuming there will be either) will love it.
I hope Prof will share some of her dear diary musings with us. There's a theory that we are, when all is said and done, largely the kid we were at 14 or 15. Or maybe that's just guys. Shallow guys. Just me?
".. even though it's not orange anymore."
How long before the more faithful commenters start offering a bowel of oranges or a framed image of a sunset in orange to keep the room name true?
We were re-organizing the framed pictures that Mom left behind.
I took down the picture of my Grandmother (Mom's Mom), and her sisters. When I disassembled the picture frame, a small newspaper clipping fell out. It was describing the war rations schedule for the next week.
Foreshadowing from the ancestors??
I'm sure that now, all of Anne's writing is catalogued, available and easily searched in her computer and/or server with copies securely stored off site at Google or some such.
Be sure that Meade knows where to find the passwords.
The old veteran harkens back to the good old days when people were appreciative of what blessings they have and not whine complain blame over every microaggression their told to kvetch about by algorithm social media facilitated troll farms and the meat puppet automaton accomplices.
They always say "It's always in the last place you look", but I've wondered why anyone would keep looking after they found what they were looking for...
That's so cool- the news clip that fell out. I wonder if you could find where it came from, who it was about. And why would that one clip have survived and made the effort to jump out into the light of day when you finally pulled out those boxes?
But this makes clear some of the characteristics of the sort of person could possibly keep up with a very seriously diverse and interesting blog for years and years until the days number 10 short of 7,000 days in a row.
Who does that?
A person who fastidiously kept a record of her young life, like a trial run for the real thing that would become Althouse. That mind remembers so many things from her younger days, as shown over the years in this blog. And that mind that went to law school and became a law professor. Then, while 'professing', found she had still more to do and looking to fill a still as yet unscratched itch, started up Althouse, the blog.
I wondered what kind of person can keep up a blog of this dimension for so long. Clearly, you were born to this. Others, like myself, have the attention span of a gnat. It took me 30 minutes just to write this comment.
I start out fine, then...hey, I need to reorder some supplements. Does the dog need to go out? Remember that great corned beef sandwich I had at Shapiro's that one time? Ummm....corned beef sandwich. Hey, it's lunchtime. I can't believe "Ozark" ended that way. Wait, I've got clothes in the dryer don't I? What was I commenting on?
You see. Some are born to this. Some are not.
What's the difference
What's the difference between and orange room and an orangerie?
John LGKTQ Henry
But do they spark joy?
There's a great comment out there that brings together unearthed 70's leftovers, Mead, Meade, dead bodies, platform shoes, big orange rooms and Bob Dylan.
This ain't it, but somebody will get it done.
The Althouse Notebooks. Kind of like the Dylan Notebooks now on display in Tulsa.
Which notebook is the equivalent of “Blood on the Tracks?”
Tulsa is a city in Oklahoma and Omaha is on the way from Madison.
Does Ann plan to ignore the violence at the Pro-Life clinic in Madison?
Enjoy it now. Because after you're gone your kids are going to be putting it in the recycling bin. If you're lucky your surviving friends will take some of your stuff and cherish it for awhile longer. I'm not saying this to be sarcastic. It's true. None of my late brothers children wanted any of his extensive library. I wound up keeping some of the rarer volumes but the rest went to friends and organizations.
It’s been a while, but I do kind of miss a hot water radiator system.
For the first Earth Day in '70, my fourth grade class drew pictures and wrote essays that were placed in a time capsule. The capsule was then entombed in the front lawn near an oak tree we planted that day.
The school closed in '82 and is now an apartment building. No one I talk to know what became of that capsule. The tree no longer stands there either.
I'm glad you had the foresight to have done this years ago and hope reading it now delights you.
I'd be appreciative of any non-specific or cryptic insights you can share without violating your own privacy: eg, whether you think your 20-something insights or priorities are bizarre, inane, or still charmingly mature.
I don't think orange is a good color for a room in general. If you have some mod clothes from 1974 to wear, to match the wall color, it might be okay. I say this as someone with an orange chair from the '70s (comfortable!) in my office, and a rust-colored office partition to boot!
The walls, however, are off-white.
Good for you. I can never find stuff like that which I know is laying around somewhere.
What a treasure. I hope your poignant meeting with twenty-something Althouse exceeds your expectations. If it were me, I’d have to light up a Virginia Slim to truly conjure the moment.
What a lovely circumstance. Please continue to share the journey with us.
Interesting juxtaposition with the prior post. Human remains emerge from a lake and human remains (in the form of memories) emerge from an attic.
“ I don't think orange is a good color for a room in general.”
When we moved into this house in 1986, I let my sons pick the color they wanted for their room. The 5 year old picked purple and the 3 year old picked orange.
I went more than 30 years before repainting that room!
I liked it orange! And I rarely used that room.
The "orange room" was what we called the storage room in the basement when I was growing up. Once upon time, it might have been orange, but it had been repainted silver as far back as I can remember (but we still called it the orange room). It was where the winter clothes, Christmas decorations, etc. went when not in use.
--gpm
>>I don't think orange is a good color for a room in general.
The guest bedrooms in my house in N.H. had hideous orange shag carpeting when I bought the house back in 1984. Also hideous green shag carpeting in the living room upstairs. Got rid of the green shag long ago, first, just to get rid of it and then in favor of hard wood flooring, though the stairway had the carpeting until much more recently. Got rid of the orange stuff maybe five or six years ago. The guest bedrooms still have weird "psychodelic" wallpaper with a lot of orange and green involved that I haven't had the energy to get rid of..
Per some recent discussion, appliances had originally been avocado. The fridge had long since been replaced with white, but the stove top and oven were still avocado. Ditto the bathroom fixtures. Now all gone, except the bath tub, which is still a cheap plastic avocado green.
--gpm
Sandy and I moved into our current home 30 years and 2 months ago. Prior to the move, I had loaded 12 bankers boxes of 'valuable' information into the attic of the new home. Our daughters have finally decided it was time to review the contents. (I knew there must be dome important stuff there.)
On top of one box were old newspapers with important headlines - Kennedy assignation, Nixon resignation. etc. The 'girls' skipped that one. I know there was important stuff somewhere: YES! It turned out to contain over 100 letters that Sandy wrote to me during our college years. Postage the first year was $.03. Our schools were 25 miles apart. If she wrote me in the morning, I'd get the letter by noon, I could reply and then get a letter from her by 6pm in the evening. (She's not a 'saver' so none of mine survived. We were married in December of our senior year.) Saved stuff can have great meaning later on.
After graduating, we spent 2 year in Madison as I studied to be an actuary and she taught math at Madison West. It's been an interesting 60 years.
ted
I've read some to her, but I'm not sure she understands it all.
"How long before the more faithful commenters start offering a bowel of oranges...." [sic]
NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!
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